Fallout Historical Speculation - African-Americans

[camwyn]

I don't know about you, but pretty much the first thing that comes to mind when I think of 'American society in the 1950s' and 'African-Americans' at the same time is 'segregation'. Other things follow after that, most of which can be summed up as 'generally shitty treatment' and 'if people didn't see the civil rights movement coming in earnest, they should've'. The thing is, I think this was one of the aspects of real-world American society that did shift and change by the time of the Great War. Just... not as fast, and not as strongly.

Start with the fact that you can roam through a wide selection of ruined buildings in the DC area, including manufacturing facilities, office buildings, public libraries, hotels, apartment complexes, hospitals, museums, and government buildings. All the buildings that are large enough to have multi-stall bathrooms have separate bathrooms for men and women, but there is not one instance of finding bathrooms labeled 'coloreds' or 'negroes' or any other racial designation. Similarly, you can find (and in some cases use) water fountains in public buildings and in businesses; all the water fountains stand alone rather than being connected to another one nearby or having another one nearby, all of them use the same in-game object, and none of them are marked as 'whites only' or 'negroes only'. There are a number of diners scattered across the landscape, none of which have any signs of any particular seating area being reserved or set aside for any reason.

Similarly, while it's been a while since I checked them closely, I don't recall any indicators of segregation appearing in the buildings in New Vegas. I can't use most of the New Vegas buildings as evidence, though. The majority of those were in use and might have been renovated, updated, or otherwise changed by the residents. The majority of untouched buildings in New Vegas were all private businesses rather than places of public accommodation, though. REPCONN or Sunset Sarsaparilla might have had different on-site policies about that kind of thing. I know we never encountered any sign of official racial separation on the grounds of the Sierra Madre Casino, which was largely sealed off from the outside world and populated only by chemically altered weirdoes who would've had no reason to rip signs off doors (the Ghost People). The Madre may or may not be admissible as evidence.

I'm not counting anything in the Divide; if Ulysses is to be believed there was a thriving community there before the Courier started a certain ball rolling, so the Divide buildings can't be relied upon as evidence. And I'm not even considering Big Mountain. Everything's been altered and rewritten there a million times over. If the drawings that appear during the intro sequence for Old World Blues are to be believed, the six highest scientists at Big Mountain were five white guys and a woman who was either white or Asian to some degree, but those are the only humans in Big Mountain we know about other than the Chinese prisoners-of-war being used as experimental subjects. No evidence one way or the other. And I don't know if the handful of prewar buildings in Zion National Park were big enough to be subject to any segregation rules that might have existed, so I'm not counting them either.

I have not played games one and two enough to verify anything about their buildings.

There is also the matter of the Vaults. The purpose of the Vaults was to run social experiments on pre-selected segments of the population to see how they reacted to the stresses of isolation and how successfully they recolonized Earth after the vault opened. Each Vault other than the control Vaults had its own experimental condition; it seems very unlikely that if society were racially segregated on the surface, every single experimental Vault would include 'and we make the blacks and the whites live together and use everything in common' alongside its main experimental condition. Vaults 3 and 8 were both control Vaults, neither one of which exhibited any signs in-game of having been racially segregated. Vault 8 became Vault City, with a racially mixed population (ostensibly people from outside can join the population, but this happens very rarely). Vault 3's inhabitants were slaughtered to the last by the Fiends. No indicators of separate restrooms, living quarters, eating facilities, etc. The only Vault known to have practiced any specific kind of isolation or separation was Vault 19, which imposed an arbitrary red/blue scheme on the population and appears to have been an experiment in paranoia anyway.

Building evidence aside, there is again the matter of the Anchorage campaign. In Operation Anchorage, the second highest ranked officer you meet (after General Chase) is Lieutenant Thomas Morgan, a black man affiliated with the Army Intelligence Corps. The female doctor mentioned in the speculation about women is also black, and there are several African-American characters working on camp equipment alongside characters of other races. Since corpses disappear within seconds in the sim, we can't use those as evidence of anything- but we can use Mothership Zeta. The medic squad that was captured by the aliens is composed of Private Elliot Tercorien, Corporal Rheems, Corporal Spurlock, Private Beckett, Private Mears, and Sergeant Daniels. Of these, Tercorien, Mears, and Daniels are listed by the game as 'Caucasian'. Rheems is listed as 'Hispanic', but he looks about as white as the other guys. Both Spurlock (dead) and Beckett (revivable) are visibly black. That's two out of six. This would appear to indicate that at least one unit was at least moderately racially integrated. I hate to keep using entertainment filmed long after the fact as an example, but two out of six is a better cast percentage than M*A*S*H. (There were, in fact, actual black doctors in the medical units in the Korean War. The executives behind the show dropped Spearchucker Jones from the cast in the first season and never really bothered again.)

I don't think pre-War Fallout America was a particularly racially enlightened society, but I do think that if it had still been officially segregated to any great degree we would have seen at least some level of physical evidence in the ruins. The Army had black men and women serving in the same units and same roles as white men and women. I am inclined to think that the early civil rights movement probably foundered, and that racial issues were addressed with 'all due deliberate haste', emphasis heavily on the 'deliberate' part, over the course of decades rather than years.

There was still at least some degree of social separation of blacks and whites, I think. Vaults 101 and 21 represent populations that were closed off from outside genetic infusions for close to two hundred years, but very few of the Vault inhabitants we see look particularly interracial in ancestry. This may be a case of the graphics engine being at fault, though. It's hard to tell ages apart, let alone races, and I know I've encountered several characters in FO3 and New Vegas who looked like they were either realistically desert-tan or just needed to wash their faces who were listed as 'African-American' in the game code- plus I have generally suspected that there are many more Vault 101 inhabitants than we see in the game. Overall, though, I think the early civil rights movement foundered- possibly due to fortuitous 'accidents' taking out several would-be leaders and court cases shutting down a lot of the others- and racial change wound up coming about very, very, very slowly, just the way the people on top thought it should be.

Comments

[agonistes]

When did the apocalyptic thing happen? Because we know that separate but equal, struck down by Brown v. Board in 1954 but not fully implemented in many places until the 1970s, rarely if ever meant actual equal facilities. If the apocalyptic thing happened in the 50s, likely as not the restrooms designated for non-white use were in basements, behind buildings, and in other inconvenient places that were already likely in poor repair by the time the bad thing happened. In many places the point was to render African Americans (and, in many places, Mexican Americans and Natives) as invisible as possible.

The military was also integrated -- not in the sense of integrated combat units (until the Korean War), but as an operation also encompassing logistics, it was integrated. And it was integrated to a degree that civilian society was not -- which was a driving factor in the multiple civil rights movements that occurred simultaneously in the 50s and 60s, of which the African American civil rights movement in its classical phase (hat tip to Bayard Rustin) was only one. People who served their country and who were accustomed to better treatment in the military were rightfully angry when they came home and whites continued treating them like crap. Hence (in part) the African American civil rights movement, the Chicano movement, the American Indian Movement, and more.

And on the subject of African American civil rights: stuff had been happening for a long, long time before MLK showed up, and even before the founding of the NAACP. Plessy v. Ferguson was an intentional test case before the Supreme Court that was a result of a lot of organizing in New Orleans. Rosa Parks had been an activist all her life, including work on the case of the Scottsboro Boys and a stint at the Highlander School.

...tl;dr on a bunch of stuff you didn't even ask about and possibly the game makers didn't know about: hello, I know nothing about Fallout but a lot about Jim Crow, how may I be of service?

[camwyn]

The apocalypse happened at about 9:45 AM Eastern time, October 23rd, 2077. The premise of the setting is that before the nukes, American life was basically like what was depicted in sci fi movies about the FuTure!!. Housewives and black and white tv and butler robots and cathode ray tube tvs and power armor and FILTHY COMMIES. So I'm trying to figure out just what changed between the 1950S and 2077. The world histories started to diverge in a large way sometime after 1945 and had definitely split by the time of the space race- Yuri Gagarin didn't exist, and the moon landings were the Virgo program, not Apollo.

If that changed, but the world still looked like the social expectations of 50s movies, i wanna figure out how they got there. What I'm doing is essentially one giant Dance of Fandom Rationalization, combined with trying to tie it to real history where I can.

I am not looking forward to trying to figure out what the state of the Native American population was by 2077, but for that I'm going to need to start with some research into American government policies of the fifties and early sixties. If you can recommend any resources in that department I'll happily go and grab a few of them.

[agonistes]

There are two big things that happened, legislation-wise, in the 20th century that affected Natives on a tribal level. First, in 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act, which was intended to mitigate in part the effects of allotment in the 1880s. Second, and probably more important for your purposes, the Indian Relocation Act, which was responsible in large part for exponentially increasing urban Native populations.

That combined with the unintentional results of Native boarding schools -- despite the privations, in many places they created a sense of pan-tribalism that had not previously existed -- created cross-nation political will that led to the rise of AIM. One of the professors in our department has specialized in this period of history -- if his books are available via library, highly recommended. Here are the notes that I made last fall during the lecture about the Relocation Act (I TAed for a class on Native America in the 20th Century):

45% of Native people lived in urban spaces in 1970
8% lived in urban spaces in 1940

PRELUDE TO RELOCATION:
-- WWII as a "pull factor"
-- jobs and opportunities in urban locations
-- Minneapolis and Los Angeles

1000 Ojibwe lived in MPLS pre-WWII; 6000 lived in MPLS post-WWII

Those are pull factors; what are push factors?

Fed Indian policy (obvi); RELOCATION AS A GOVERNMENT PROGRAM
-- 1948 pilot program: Navajo relocation to Denver, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles
-- 1951 - Dillon Meyer establishes Branch of Placement and Relocation

Pilot program: intended to provide assistance to Navajo folks for job searches in LA, DEN, SLC
-- provided employment counseling, housing assistance, and recruited whole families to cities
-- program was a success
-- success leads to the BIA's creation (by Dillon Meyer) of the Branch of Placement and Relocation
-- had branches in CHI, STL, Oakland/SF/SJ, Tulsa, OKC, ABQ, and Seattle
-- relocation centers charged with helping new relocatees to find housing, offer job training, provide medical care for up to a year

1951-52 - 1785 people participated in program -- limited funding for housing/living costs -- but considered to be successful -- DFW added, and Cleveland added as centers

By 1960, 33,000 people had gone through fed relocation program. By 1973, more than 100,000 had relocated to urban cities as a result of the program -- buuuuuuut funding hadn't really been increased. Pilot program was much better funded.

Also note that MPLS was never a relocation center -- unlike Chicago.

this Denver flyer is hilarious, omg -- Maroon Bells, not the right number of fourteeners

URBAN INDIAN COMMUNITIES:
-- build new Indian communities within cities
-- development of Indian Centers and Organizations (Chicago Indian Center, 1953 -- services and community center)
-- contributions to American Indian Activism

Chances for relocation were relatively slim; solved problem of urban anonymity by building community
-- pre WWII, almost all Comanche lived in SW OK; post-WWII, many of them moved to Dallas and LA
-- think of this in conjunction with rise of powwows

Younger Natives started believing it was futile to wait for socioeconomic conditions to improve -- hence rise of direct activism, which leads to rise of Native nationalism -- this is where you start to see concept of modern tribal sovereignty become an increasing part of discourse in Indian Country.

[camwyn]

Oh, excellent. Thank you!